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Pony: I'm Hanging Up!
3.8.2006
Last night Kiff and I went to the Gladstone to see Jonathan Ames perform as part of "This is not a Reading Series."
I had the good fortune to see Ames at PS122 seven years ago, when I was in New York for a month, housesitting for Lisa. Kato came to visit and we went to see his show on a a hunch. It was a blast. Great storytelling that was cringingly intimate, original and absurd (the absurd highlight was the jig he danced with a one-footed man (leg?), wearing a mangina - a prosthetic vagina).
Many private jokes stemmed from that night, including one from the story about his great aunt, who was paranoid about obscene phone calls. Whenever she got an unintelligible caller, she assumed it was obscene and would announce: "I'm hanging up!"
I'll be damned if that line hasn't had staying power with certain friends over the years.
"I'm hanging up!"
I was a bit inarticulate (as I often am when I meet someone in person for the first time) but I did manage, when getting my book signed, to tell him that years later, his stories/jokes were still fresh in our brains.
Kato is driving back from LA, so she couldn't make it last night, but I did get a chance to ask "whatever happened to your friend with the mangina?" LIttle did I know that I had hit upon a sore spot. The Mangina had become a curse.
